Wasn't that an odd jump from nonfiction filmmaking to novel writing? "It's all about storytelling," says Stein. "I learned how to construct a story through documentaries." Thus a new career was born, "without realizing how difficult it would be to write the second novel." In New York, his first draft needed rewriting, he remembers, and "two months turned into two and one half years." Recently named a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association prize winner, How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets finally reached print in 2005, earning generally favorable reviews for its tale of surprise fatherhood, epilepsy, and charting a music career. (It's new in paperback from SoHo Press, $13.)
And, during that arduous process, Stein even wrote his first play, Brother Jones, produced last year in Los Angeles. Now also working as a consultant in primary education, he likes Seattle's small and collegial literary community. "In New York, there are no local writers. You're either a big fish or you're chum. I have a feeling that what I'm doing is part of a Northwest school." At present, he's working on two books, one related from a dog's perspective. Instead of young hotshots being propelled to literary stardom in McSweeney's, he sees more of a low-key craftsmanlike approach to writing here—even if that means accompanying a friend and fellow author on the ferry to a reading at Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island. In a crowd of a half-dozen, a friendly face counts. BRIAN MILLER
Jeremy Eaton
Jeremy Eaton
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Garth Stein Queen Anne Books, 1811 Queen Anne Ave. N., 206-283-5624, www.queenannebooks.com. Free. 6:30 p.m. Thurs., April 6.
Solveig Torvik
Torvik returns to her (fictionalized) roots.
Yuen Lui Studio
Former longtime Seattle Post-Intelligencer associate editorial page editor Torvik, now retired in Winthrop, grew up under the influence of the First Scandinavian Commandment, which her book helpfully defines: "If a thing remains unspoken, it does not exist; if pain is given no voice, it lacks power to harm." But that's the sort of command a journalist is bound to break, and Torvik does it big-time in her debut novel, Nikolai's Fortune (University of Washington, $24.95), a fictionalized saga of her family and the epic mystery at its heart—the vanished windfall her great-grandfather made in Astoria, Ore., after he left Scandinavia in 1883. More than a century later, Torvik investigated Nikolai's inexplicable disappearance, and a more invaluable treasure, the tale of how she—and her difficult mother—came to be. (Nikolai lived in my ghost-town hometown, Deep River, Wash.; one research source for the novel is my historian uncle, Carlton Appelo.)
Torvik explains that the book is a "historical novel/memoir based on the lives of four generations of women in my family in Finland, Norway, and Idaho. I did not want to write a memoir, but I finally had to face the fact that if I were to complete a book dealing with the generational consequences of broken bonds between mothers and daughters, I would have to enter the story."
Her saga begins in 1800s Finland with a scandalous affair between Torvik's dairymaid great-grandma Marie and Nikolai, "who unknowingly leaves her pregnant (with my grandmother Kaisa) when he sails for America to make his fortune." When Kaisa is 12, mama Marie sends her on foot to flee famine-ravaged Finland for Norway. "Kaisa walks, in winter, nearly 500 miles across the mountains of Lapland to her new home in Norway. There, she marries a Sami, becomes a destitute young widow with three children to support, twice gives birth to children conceived by rape, endures the prejudice of Norwegians toward Finns, and finally in desperation gives away her children and goes to work as a cook in a desolate copper mine."
Torvik traces the family saga up to her own generation, with astounding instances of child slavery, a childhood in Nazi- occupied Norway, and dark family secrets revealed only recently. As over-the-top as it all sounds, Torvik says, "The main characters and major events are real. It's a story of tough women toughing it out in a tough world." TIM APPELO
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